Franchise PowerUp 
You hear about social media marketing everywhere these days. You see it on the news, they talk about it in your office, you get job openings for SMM managers. And it’s a very important tool for business. Especially for small businesses, and there are so many options for social media marketing services.
But what is it? Let’s find out.
Social Media Marketing is one of the non-standard ways of promotion in business, attracting the target audience from social networks, forums, weblogs to the website. SMM is considered one of the most promising methods of promotion. To confirm this thesis, here are some statistics:
- There are 4.48 billion social media users worldwide, which is 57% of the world population.
- The average Internet user devotes approximately 8 hours a week to social networks.
- 20% of Internet users consider social networks as a source of information.
- More than 40 million users from around the world access TikTok daily.
- Facebook has 2.853 billion monthly active users.
- Since 2012, the average time spent on social networks has increased from 1.5 hours to 2.5 hours.
Social networks are the place where the target audience for a business in almost any niche is located. SMM promotion on social networks allows direct interaction with potential clients:
- Introduce the brand, build recognition, and a loyal attitude.
- Receive feedback about their products/services.
- Work with feedback, objections, deliver information of interest.
- Engage in interaction through discussions, competitions, etc.
- “Pushing” potential customers to take targeted action.
- Energize the customer base for further interaction.
The considerable trump card of social networks is that their audience is relatively easy to segment. Facebook, TikTok, and other platforms have been collecting information about users for years and know more about them in some places than anyone else. Everyone can use this knowledge to their advantage in a targeted advertising campaign.
What you can use social networks for:
- Generating and promoting content. This can be articles from the blog, news from the company’s field, videos for Youtube, or announcements of new products on Instagram.
- Responding to newsbreaks. Companies often express their opinion on important events in their business sphere or take part in flash mobs.
- Launching advertisements. To do this, you need to choose the right audience, set up the ads, and calculate the budget. Sometimes, for these purposes hire a separate specialist — the targetologist.
- Monitoring the effectiveness and counting the money. Without proper analytics, it is not clear whether the company’s contribution to social networks pays off.
Companies do not always use super-popular social networks like Instagram or Facebook to promote themselves. Often an SMM specialist chooses more niche sites, where it is more likely that the target audience is more likely to be found.
Now that we know what SMM is, let’s go deeper into social media marketing services for small businesses.
Social media marketing services
Ten years ago, social media was a small marketing area, so it was easy to manage manually. Today, brand promotion through social platforms is a complex process that requires the use of many additional tools that help marketers accomplish different tasks:
- Monitoring brand mentions on social media;
- Creating and planning posts;
- Building communication with users;
- Analyzing the results.
In this article, we decided to examine several popular social media marketing services in order to understand what they can offer to small businesses.
PromoRepublic
PromoRepublic is a versatile social media marketing service that provides a vast option of features for small businesses. Social media calendar, Content organizer, detailed analytics — you get it all with PromoRepublic. This service allows you to create and automate the publication of content, create in-depth reports with the help of AI, and much more!
PromoRepublic has three pricing plans: Standard for $39 per month, Professional for $79, and Enterprise, where the cost depends on the set of services you choose. This makes PromoRepublic one of the most convenient and affordable social media marketing services.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is an indispensable tool if you want quality management of your company’s social networks. Sprout Social collects all incoming messages from all your accounts on different social networks so that you can access them from one program. You can also get detailed reports and tips on how to improve your social media activity. Well, among other things, it’s very user-friendly. There are several plan options for small businesses. The Standard plan is $39 a month. The Deluxe one is $59 a month. You can also get Premium, which gives you unlimited profile maintenance. You’ll pay $899 a month for it.
Digital Sherpa
Another great social media marketing service option for small businesses is Digital Sherpa. It provides everything you need to manage social media. Digital Sherpa offers an extensive range of services:
- Creating your company’s Twitter or Facebook accounts
- Creating and managing content and advertising campaigns
- Detailed analytics on your social networks and sites
Considering how useful this tool is and how profitable it can be for your business to use social networks, Digital Sherpa offers very good pricing plans. For example, the starting price is only $59 per month.
HubSpot
HubSpot is a service for automating your marketing that covers all your business needs: social media and SEO, lead generation, and CRM.
The service allows organizations to engage audiences, increase the number of consumers and launch email campaigns and store the information they need for their work. In HubSpot, departmental employees can track various media channels: blogs, social networks, advertising, and other possible options from where to track user traffic.
HubSpot supports many platforms — Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google+, Xing, YouTube, and more.
Agorapulse
Agorapulse is a social media management service with scheduling, analytics, and monitoring functions. This tool collects all mentions of your business on social networks, and the tracking option allows you to search for keywords, URLs and analyze mentions of you on Twitter. In addition, Agorapulse allows you to view comments on your Facebook and Instagram posts.
This service supports all the most important platforms for your business: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn.
Zoho Social
Zoho Social is one of the social media marketing services that not only allows you to publish posts but also to schedule and analyze the content and performance of your social media accounts and even keep track of events. With Zoho Social, you can also track a wide variety of information in real time about how your current and potential audiences are interacting with your brand. With this tool, you can easily manage your Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ profiles.
Planable
The service allows you to work with the following social media: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. You can test the tool for free for 30 days and then consider buying a paid version. The standard package will cost $33, and the premium one costs $83.
Here you can create, edit, and schedule content in any format: photos, videos, gifs, carousels. You can publish posts on various social networks at once, adapting content to each of them. You can share access to colleagues and customers, work with hashtags, geotags, and even messages. Publish content all at once, set up remote posting, or save ideas in drafts.
TweetReach
When you see this name, the logical thought that comes to mind is, “Oh, this service can only be used on Twitter.” But it’s not really like that. TweetReach also gives you analytics on Instagram and Facebook. This social media marketing service uses Union Metrics, which provides an in-depth and detailed analysis of your social networks — content effectiveness, reach, engagement, evaluation of your competitors’ social networks, and more.
With TweetReach, you can determine the most effective hashtags, the ideal content type and timing for publishing it, identify your competitors’ promising ideas, and view a real-time report. The service offers three plans for $49, $99, or $199 per month. And the first use of the service is completely free.
Sendible
Sendible is another social media marketing service designed for agencies working with multiple clients at once. This tool offers all the features you need: scheduling, interaction with social media content, the ability to respond to comments and messages from users, hashtag tracking, keyword searches, and competitors, both on social networks and online. The service supports all the social networks your business needs: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Google My Business, and many more.
Sendible is a fairly inexpensive service that offers 4 different plans ranging from $29 to $299 per month, depending on the number of users. It also has a 14-day trial period, and you get a 15% discount if you pay for a year of usage at once.
To sum up
Social networks have the most diverse and solvent audience with different needs and interests, social statuses, and interest in purchasing a particular product or service.
That is why SMM or Social Media Marketing is really effective, and with the annual increase in the audience of active social media users, it is only gaining momentum.
In addition, as you have already understood, various social media marketing services are a great way to automate the work of a small business. So, choosing and setting up any of the tools listed above will speed up the process of maintaining business accounts on several social networks, and you will be able to devote your free time to tasks that you have never had time to do before.
